


these fleeting temples

by innie



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:54:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23048095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: The tales don't match the truth.
Relationships: Ariadne & Asterion the Minotaur (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Ariadne & Daedalus, Ariadne & Minos, Ariadne & Pasiphaë, Ariadne/Asterion the Minotaur (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 17
Collections: Wayback Exchange 2020





	these fleeting temples

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Meilan_Firaga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meilan_Firaga/gifts).



> This was fun to write - thanks for requesting it!
> 
> Title from Danusha Laméris's "Small Kindnesses."

I am not a servant-girl, but a princess, and yet it falls to me to keep the cunning house Daedalus designed in good order. It is one of my father's whims, as though a king should have fancies in place of his reason.

I am not his sister but Asterion calls me with soft touches and sweet looks his family, his beloved, his world. I am not his sister, but there are those who believe otherwise; it changes nothing, given how incestuously tangled royal and divine bloodlines have become. I know Minos is my father, a weak king always looking for an opportunity to better himself, regardless of whom he might betray. I am his get by a slave girl, the first living child born to him and therefore acknowledged despite the mother's status. The slave girl — whose name has never been spoken in my presence — apparently was notable for only one thing other than her fertility and quick demise; she had masses of hair that hung in ropes down her back, black snakes as if she were a gorgon. I think of that sometimes; it would be nice to claim a drop of divinity.

Asterion is awash in it, little as he seems to care for it. He is the child of Queen Pasiphaë, herself a daughter of Helios of the sun and Perseis of the ocean; little wonder that when she was carrying him — I am five years his elder, and who can say which is the wiser — Pasiphaë glowed with a joyous heat and her swollen belly had sounded to my little ear, pressed against its convex curve, like the deep water that surrounded our kingdom. And the bull that sired him might have been a gift from the Lord of the Sea or, as I believe, changed at the critical moment for Poseidon himself. 

It would have been the bull's second switch — trickery is a motif in the tattered map of our lineage — and a way for Poseidon to better one of his brother's most infamous exploits. Zeus had transformed into a bull to carry off Europa; Poseidon became one to impregnate Pasiphaë. The story has gone round that Pasiphaë was cursed into a mad lust for the beast, but far more likely that it was the god between her thighs; she sang as her belly swelled, she cried when she bore her extraordinary child, and she suckled him, nuzzling at the fuzzy stubs that would grow into his horns. Bulls are another of our motifs, with Minos's mother and wife both famed for their associations with them.

His daughter would be famous too, if only the world knew of how I spend my days.

*

The dancing ground Daedalus built for me was my favorite place long before Minos snatched away what had not been his gift in the first place. It was a space sacred to the female arts, the blood we spilled just from living in these bodies, and Daedalus had been guided by his wife, Eileithyia, the queen's favorite companion, in constructing a field that would honor women from Gaia, mother of us all, to the mortals who labored unsung. When I danced there, I imagined that I was my mother, thick locks like a rushing river down my back, the weight of them tipping my head back and reconceiving the shapes my hips and hands described in the space around me. When I danced there, Pasiphaë and her ladies danced with me.

Minos bided his time, stoking his rage. Our dances had awakened our bodies, there was rich earth clutched in our fists; every one of the queen's ladies, married or not, conceived a child, and Eileithyia was kept busy for weeks on end, attending to them all even as she carried her own longed-for child. She carried high and delivered so many bundles of bloodied, shrieking limbs that it seemed we would never have silence again. Her belly dropped and Icarus fairly flew out of her, into the queen's waiting arms, and I was the one who placed him on his mother's breast. 

When we returned to our field, it had been cleared by new slaves to make way for the newest commission Daedalus was to carry out for the weakling who called himself our king: an impenetrable, inescapable trap for the son that his wife had borne. Pasiphaë gave the king a look that should have slain him on the spot and cuddled the child Asterion all the closer. Eileithyia, she told me, knowing I could keep a secret, was ensuring that what Daedalus built would only have the appearance of what the king wanted. Getting Asterion out of the king's sight could only benefit the child, who had yet to lose his baby fat or understand why his only sanctuary was his mother's arms.

*

I knew every measure of this land when it was my dancing ground, and have been walking this labyrinth for so many years that I can find my way to its center without thought or aid. My feet know where to fall, which turn to make to get to the chambers where my beloved makes his home. The outer rings of the labyrinth are covered and dark — Minos had sought to keep Asterion, my starry one, hidden from the stars — but the roof thins as it gets to the center, and his grandfather's sun warms my beloved's body and the tides of his grandmother's ocean pull at his heart.

I shed what I am wearing as I go, leaving an entirely unnecessary trail behind me of sandals and hairpins and bangles and garments.

He is sitting in a shadow today, his great eyes closed as if he wants to listen more intently to whatever message the roar of the waves has for him. Minos is a fool; on an island he sought to keep a prisoner landlocked, and in spite of a mother's love sought to keep her son isolated.

Asterion's pull over me is inexorable. He does not speak, he does not kiss; all the honeyed words are mine for him, and yet I love him and his touch says more than any poet's recitations. He is kept naked as if he is a beast — so petty is Minos in every detail — and I am naked when I come to him because a princess should always be proper and it is my own, rather than the king's, notions of propriety that concern me. A woman ought to choose when she wishes to be naked with her lover.

I am only supposed, by my father's decree, to keep the labyrinth fit for habitation. I do not make any gesture toward cleaning; Asterion is fastidious and maintains his home royally. What I do, what I have done for years, is sit beside him and pour stories into his ears, stroking his long soft nose, caressing his broad chest. It is the flicking of his ears at certain words that acts as a voice, telling me everything he wants to say. 

What we have learned in recent years is that we are willing to sacrifice a story — even ones of the gods' damaging conquests, their propensity to turn themselves and the mortals they pursue into shapes that strip away happiness — for the pleasures of sex. I do not have the breath for both at once, but I am working on my stamina.

I swing my leg over his lap and stand astride him, facing him. He turns his head to see me clearly out of one of his long-lashed eyes and then licks between my breasts where the sweat has already begun to spring from his proximity. My hands lift up my breasts to put them in the path of that broad pink tongue. His hand is on his phallus, upstanding and strong, and there is the sound and smell of the sea as I, dripping wet, sink down on him. 

I let go of myself to clutch at him, his horns cool and smooth in my fists. His hands are drawing me closer still, on my back, in my hair, as his hips snap sharply up. I cannot be unseated, locked to him like this, and he does not want me to go. He is a man between my legs, but the blood pounding in me recognizes him as a bull too. "Asterion," I moan as he twines my hair into one long rope and tugs at it sharply. His grassy breath is coming in pants that nearly burn my breast. "My starry one, my prince."

*

I do not care what the legends will make of us. He is my family, my beloved, my world.


End file.
